Poverty rankings of opportunity profiles

Abstract

We address the problem of ranking distributions of opportunity sets in terms of poverty. In order to accomplish this task, we identify a suitable notion of ‘multidimensional poverty line’ and we characterize axiomatically several poverty rankings of opportunity profiles. Among them, the Head-Count and the Opportunity-Gap poverty rankings, which are the natural counterparts of the most widely used income poverty indices.Poverty, opportunity sets, head-count, poverty-gap.